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I successfully migrated from my old 120gb SSD to a 256gb SSD by using dd from a gparted Live USB. I am using Ubuntu and Windows 10 with dual-boot (grub). Everything boots fine :-)

Now I want to resize the partitions to get access to the unallocated space. Gparted and Windows do not give me the option to increase the partition size (I guess this is because it would change the position of the boot sectors).

This is how everything looks from the GParted live side: enter image description here Do you have any suggestion to increase the partition sizes of /dev/sda2 and /dev/sda6?

Coureard
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  • /dev/sda is not a partition, but a disk (do you mean sda1? or sda2) sda6 can increase size if space is within its extended partition (but your unallocated is outside of the extended thus out-of-bounds). sda1 or sda2 can't use the larger unallocated (assuming that's what you meant by sda) because to increase size the space must be next-to-it (they could use the 953mb possibly). Is your partition table MBR/DOS or GPT ? – guiverc Aug 05 '19 at 12:37
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    BIOS install so MBR with extended partition. You have to expand extended partition, sda3 as it is a container for your logical partitions to include all or most of unallocated. With SSD some extra space is recommended, but that can be inside partition also. Then move sda5 to the right to make room for what you want for Windows. Then expand sda5. And move start of sda3, the extended to make unallocated next to the NTFS primary partition. Use Windows to expand the NTFS partition. Be sure to have good backups. – oldfred Aug 05 '19 at 15:08
  • @guiverc You are right i meant /dev/sda2. I have corrected it.

    The partition table is msdos

     – Coureard Aug 06 '19 at 11:02
  • You're welcome! :-) Favour returned, question upvoted... – Fabby Aug 07 '19 at 08:53

1 Answers1

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Changing partitions on the fly is dangerous! Make a full System backup using CloneZilla Live First!

As /dev/sda6 is inside an extended partition with no contiguous space behind it, you need to:

  1. Grow the /dev/sda3 partition with the amount that you want to increase /dev/sda6.
  2. move /dev/sda5 to rightmost boundary of the above
  3. extend /dev/sda6 with the space now available to its right

To be able to resize /dev/sda2, I would:

  1. move /dev/sda3 completely to the right
  2. reboot to test
  3. expand /dev/sda2 but leaving 10% of the disc unallocated!
    (that way, you can still expand sda3 to the left or sda2 to the right in the future!)

Done! :-)

Community
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Fabby
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  • thanks it worked and everything still boots :-) – Coureard Aug 06 '19 at 11:00
  • Thanks for your advice. I will do that.

    Unfortunately, gparted does not allow me to drag the /dev/sda3 to the right. Only resizing seems to work. :-/

     – Coureard Aug 07 '19 at 08:37
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    Using this description helped me moving the extended partition: https://askubuntu.com/questions/659797/gparted-cant-move-extended-partition-to-the-right

    Now it works :-) Thank you very much.

     – Coureard Aug 07 '19 at 08:50
  • Edited answer and deleted superfluous comments... Please do the same to keep things tidy in here for the next person that runs into your question and my answer... ;-) – Fabby Aug 07 '19 at 08:58